NFS Underground is a blueprint for it's sequel and the single most important game in the series, which set the direction the series would mostly be going in for the next 20 years.
However, on it's own this game is broken, repetitive slog, which forces the player through repeating tracks over and over again while also having the opponents cheat their way to victory no matter what difficulty you pick. Each of the player's wins feels like luck since most of the time the reason why it happened is because the rubberbanding AI wasn't as broken as it usually is, the game's hyper realistic collision physics haven't flipped his car over on a straight road for no reason, or the traffic car hasn't spawned right behind a blind turn, sending the player's riced Honda Civic spinning 360 degrees and flying 3 meters into the air.
Do I recommend playing this game? Eh, purely for historic value. It looks really good for the time, the car selection is overall solid, and the modding options can look cool.
The music also has a silly childish charm to it, looking at it in the retrospect. Since it usually forces itself to be cool so hard that it turnes to being cringey, which in itself provides unintentional comedic value, making it great, albeit again not in a way it was originally intended.